Kimberly Johnson's dazzling first collection is rooted in the land and language she inherits, then claims for her own. Informed throughout by Milton's Paradise Lost, Johnson's poems burst with the flora and fauna of a magnificently imagined landscape, and gain their power from the incomparable language she uses to describe it. Her voice is wholly new and unique; Leviathan with a Hook heralds the arrival of one of the new standard-bearers of American verse.

“[Johnson’s] classical sensibilities—attuned not just to the classics themselves but to their resonances in English literature—help to account for verses whose tensile energies and fierce intellectual passion are stronger than in any young American poet I know.”—John Talbott, Yale Review

“Kimberly Johnson rises in a few lines from weevils to threshing the stars. These poems fear neither glory nor ruin.”—Rosanna Warren

Kimberly Johnson is a translator, Renaissance scholar, and the author of three books of poems, including A Metaphorical Godand Uncommon Prayer. Her poems appear widely in such publications as The New Yorker, Slate, and The Iowa Review. She lives in Salt Lake City.